Settlers of Catan

After having my final class before the holidays, exchanging some Hong Kong Dollars to Renmenbi, and having a wicked cuttlefish and pork soup-noodle lunch, I parked myself outside the cafeteria in the sun to play a game of Settlers of Catan with 3 fellow GLOBErs.

Settlers of Catan (henceforth known as Settlers) is a 3-4 person board game with the objective to build settlements, gain resources and expand into a sufficiently large civilization before your opponents. It has a multiple-stage element similar to monopoly, but games rarely last more than 1½ hours, so people never get bored. It is the perfect combination of luck, skill, strategy and human interaction (i.e. bartering for resources with your opponents), and the game can quickly turn on its head with a few lucky roles of the dice.

Settlers is an old game and the concept has been copied into numerous computer games I used to play as a kid, such as Civilization, Age of Empires and Railroad Tycoon, and so it naturally had an appeal to me. The board game doesn't have any military element, so it doesn't end up with one all-powerful player like Risk, and alliances are not really necessary or alter a lot, which keeps the fun of "every man for himself". So apart from the "nerdy" remarks by the 4 GLOBE girls who walked past, we boys have found the perfect game that is here to stay!

It has been some time since I last played a board game, but I am sure I'll have more games of Settlers in the future. That will have to wait till after my trip to Cheng Du, where I will spend Chinese New Years. I depart for Shenzhen, which is just over the boarder from Hong Kong, tomorrow at 11:30 AM local time. We take the 2-hour flight to Cheng Du early Saturday morning. So until the 28th in the evening, I am off the radar and thus no blogging..:)